CORRESPONDENCE.

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Author: Anderson, Thomas V.Hines, Joseph A.Piehler, HelenReagan, DanTaylor, W.Skurkiss, PeterSmith, Wm. Brad

One of the things I took away from William Tucker's "The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde" (TAS, March 2006) is the genesis of the left's marriage of anti-capitalism (socialism) to all things related to sexual "liberation"-promiscuity, feminism, homosexual rights, no-fault divorce, abortion, and so on.

It came from Frederick Engels who, I thank Mr. Tucker for pointing out, wrote an addendum to Karl Marx's Das Kapital in 1884. In it, Engels claimed that in the distant past human communities had indiscriminate sex where everyone mated with everyone else free of guilt, free of consequences. Engels claimed this "paradise" was lost when patriarchy came along, quickly followed by capitalism. The conclusion that comrade Engels drew from his amateurish stab at anthropology was that capitalism is bad and so is patriarchy and sexual restraint.

This helps explain the coalition that today makes up the Democratic Party. In it are: economic Marxists, the abortion industry, Hollywood and pornographers, radical feminists, homosexual activists, the America-haters, and militant secularists. The odd man out in the Democratic Party is the African Americans, who ironically provide the votes that keep this ungodly coalition in existence…

William Tucker presents "a plausible scenario" for the transition from the variety of "polymorphous polygamy" found among chimpanzees to monogamy in humans. There is, in fact, an evolutionary model first put forward by Richard Wrangham, a student of Jane Goodall, et al., in a 1999 article, "The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins." The article suggests that contrary to traditional interpretations, cooking evolved quite early, not as a means of processing meat, but for the preparation of roots and tubers. Archaeological evidence shows a significant reduction of the chewing complex from Australopithecines to Homo Erectus, a change that precedes clear evidence for hunting. According to the hypothesis, early hominids discovered that tubers dug up after fires or volcanic eruptions were easier to chew. This led to the deliberate use of fire to cook tough roots and tubers. It was this particular innovation--cooking--that led to pair-bonding.

As summarized in the abstract (available online), the article notes that "the adoption of cooking required delay of the consumption of food while it was accumulated and/or brought to a processing area, and accumulations of food were valuable and stealable. Dominant (e.g., larger) individuals (typically male) were therefore able to scrounge from subordinate (e.g., smaller) individuals (typically female) instead of relying on their own foraging efforts. Because female fitness is limited by access to resources (particularly energetic resources), this dynamic would have favored females able to minimize losses to theft. To do so, we suggest, females formed protective relationships with male co-defenders."

The author concludes that "cooking was responsible for the evolution of the unusual human social system in which pair bonds are embedded within multi-female, multi-male communities and supported by strong mutual and frequently conflicting sexual interest."

It is worth noting that Professor Wrangham's conclusions were based, in part, on the same observations regarding the amorous "safaris" among chimpanzees noted by Tucker. What I find particularly attractive about this explanation is that it creates a link between two of the most common definitions of the monogamous household--the hearth and the marital bed. Not surprisingly, it is precisely that linkage that has tended to produce the strongest reactions against the thesis from the academic community.

A quibble with Alfred S. Regnery's Note from the Publisher CA Failure to Communicate") in your March 2006 issue: While President Reagan did refer to totalitarian states as "evil" in his 1982 speech to the House of Commons, the phrase "evil empire" did not appear until his 1983 speech to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals.

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By Thomas V. Anderson, St. Petersburg, Florida; Joseph A. Hines, Gilbert, Arizona; Helen Piehler, Seattle, Washington; Dan Reagan, Monument Beach, Massachusetts; W. Taylor, Covina, California; Peter Skurkiss, Stow, Ohio; Wm. Bradford Smith, Associate Professor of History, Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia and Roger Clegg, President, Center for Equal Opportunity Sterling, Virginia